A year or so ago, I decided to join an article marketing challenge.  The goal was to write a certain number of marketing articles in a two-month time frame — about 20 or 30 articles, I believe.  These articles were to be posted on free article distribution sites as an effort to help our businesses.

Article marketing does help your business.  They can be used with link building campaigns to generate lots of links to your site and increase your link popularity.  More link popularity indicates to search engines that your site is popular, and therefore worthy of a higher search engine ranking.

Also, some distribution sites allow you to put contextual links in your article or press release.  Contextual links are where a keyword phrase in the article links back to your website, such as with the "contextual links" hyperlink in this paragraph.  The advantage to this is that search engines perceive links as more relevant when they use a keyword phrase as their text (the keyword relating to the page it links to, of course).

Unfortunately, my stint with the article marketing challenge didn’t go so well.  I wrote eight or ten articles and then gave up.  Many small business owners have this same experience — they think they’ll save money on an Internet marketing service by doing it themselves, and then they discover it’s more difficult than they thought.  Writing and submitting marketing articles is extremely time consuming, which means that it takes up time that could be better spent on running your business and making money.

If you are like me and have tried and failed at marketing articles, or perhaps you want to learn from my mistakes, I recommend looking up a search engine marketing company.  These Internet marketers will do all the busywork for you, leaving you to do what you set out to do in the first place: run your business.

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